Twenty-two years ago, between the winter and spring of 1982, the first massive evacuation of settlements took place: the settlements in the Sinai Peninsula were evacuated as part of the peace treaty with Egypt. Eighteen settlements consisting of about 6,000 inhabitants were evacuated during those months. The climax was the evacuation of Yamit in April 1982, just prior to transferring the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt as part of the agreement. (Before that, three settlements were evacuated: the cooperative settlements [moshavim] of Di Zahav and Neviyot on the Red Sea coast, and the city of Ophira in the south of the peninsula.)
It is true that during the War of Independence several settlements were evacuated due to the military difficulties involved in their protection (such as Kibbutz Beit Ha’arava near the Dead Sea and the settlements on Gush Etzion), and during the Yom Kippur War many of the settlements on the Golan were also evacuated. However, these evacuations were carried out because of immediate military constraints and not as a result of a collective political and national decision, such as is relevant to our situation. Therefore, it is worthwhile examining the particulars of the Sinai evacuation, despite the differences between the two, in order to learn as much as possible about the problems that may arise during an evacuation from Yesha.
The unprecedented trauma in Israel surrounding the evacuation of thousands of people from their homes by force, because of a political and governmental decision, drew much attention from Israeli media in real-time. In dozens of “color” articles, the press reported on the trauma of the upcoming displacement, mainly from the settlements of the Yamit region. In the years following the evacuation, the most prominent reports were those that tried to find out what had happened to the evacuees. These articles dealt with everything from divorce and conflict among evacuated families to emigration from Israel, because of anger at Israeli society for “betraying” its compatriots, and even included premature deaths attributed to the evacuation trauma.
But it is clear that journalists lack the professional qualifications to evaluate the real consequences of trauma, certainly the long-term ones. Therefore the professional studies that dealt with the trauma of the evacuation are much more relevant to our issue. It seems that the trauma issue attracted the attention of a number of research teams from various disciplines: psychology, political science and geography. When these research studies were publicized, it became clear that the researchers had identified the basis of the study in time and had set up research staffs to accompany the evacuees even before the actual evacuation, so that their studies covered the months of anticipating evacuation and coping with the actual evacuation, as well as the period following it.
It is interesting to note that all these studies were conducted not among the inhabitants of the city of Yamit, which had been the largest settlement in the region, but in the smaller settlements nearby. It seems that the researchers saw these smaller settlements as more successful “research laboratories” than Yamit, as their size made it more manageable for the researcher to track the structure and composition of the overall social fabric of a community. It is also important to note that the researchers were more interested in the social and psychological effects of the evacuation, and not necessarily the political effects.
One example of such a study was conducted by five psychiatrists from various research institutions and summarized by two of them: Professor Chaim Dasberg and Dr. Gabriel Shefler.[2] The study was conducted in one of the settlements in the region during the months prior to the evacuation; it does not reveal the real name of the moshav, evidently for reasons of individual privacy. Instead, the moshav is called by the pseudonym “Naveh.” These are the conclusions of the research:
• Many moshav inhabitants occupied themselves in nostalgic activities in the months before the evacuation, as they attempted to document and reconstruct their lives in the region, such as photographing the moshav and the area. Women, especially, stood out in these ventures.
• Uncertainty and thirst for information, regarding both the political echelon and the character of its considerations and decisions, as well as about the economic situation and market conditions in the context of compensation for evacuation predominated.
• Some of the moshav residents, especially the founders, continued to develop plans for the future. In the days preceding the decision of the then-defense minister, Ariel Sharon, to destroy all the settlements in the region, there were those who even tried (unsuccessfully) to establish contact with the Egyptian authorities in order to assure themselves ties with the place even after the evacuation.
• Many residents neglected daily life in the settlements – gardening, communal meetings of the members – and focused instead on life outside the moshav.
• The youths reacted less traumatically than the adults had feared, and many of them were actually full of anticipation for the future.
• Many residents neglected other emotional problems they had and tended to attribute all their problems to the evacuation crisis, even if these were not at all related.
• As time went on, or perhaps because of the tension, some residents developed aggressive fantasies - such reconquering the area or, conversely, destroying it before the evacuation.
• Some of the inhabitants preferred immediate evacuation as opposed to a “slow death.”
• As opposed to images created by the press (which, naturally, focus on the dramatic and the aberrant), the researchers found only two cases of divorce among the moshav members a year after the evacuation. In fact, the researchers concluded that most of the evacuees were successful in rehabilitating their lives and conducting both their family lives and economic affairs. The children, also, were rehabilitated.
• The researchers felt that the major reason for this was because the moshav population was selective; i.e., candidates for membership in the moshav had been selected, or accepted, by the settlement institutions as being suitable to weather the difficult conditions of life prevailing in the region. Thus, the group does not constitute a normal population profile, people who might be expected to encounter greater adjustment difficulties.
Other studies reach similar conclusions regarding the ultimate success of most of the inhabitants in rehabilitating their lives. Some of the researchers, notably Professor Nurit Kliot of Haifa University, even claim that the percentage of divorces among the Yamit evacuees does not deviate from general divorce statistics of the population as a whole.[3] According to Professor Kliot, post-evacuation family crises cropped up among families that were already in distress for reasons not related to the evacuation, although the evacuation may have served to exacerbate the existing tensions thus leading to divorce. But there were few families that functioned normally beforehand and got to divorce or other acute crises only because of the evacuation.
Dasberg and Shefler describe the chronological unfolding of events during the stages of social disintegration of the moshav:
In June 1981, about ten months before the evacuation, tension cropped up among the members because of disputes regarding the division of property. (This issue is especially relevant for an agricultural settlement and less for a communal settlement, and even less for those in a municipal framework.) Mutual suspicion arose in the moshav regarding those who were perceived as attempting to take advantage of the evacuation at the expense of other members. In addition, heightened criticism was directed at the local leadership, which served as the punchbag for all the complaints and the anger. This period was called, post factum, an “orgy of aggression.”
In February 1982, about two months before the evacuation, the moshav split up into small groups of isolated families or even individuals who confronted each other over clashing interests. Concurrently, people began feeling aimless and apathetic towards the place as they realized that the moshav would no longer be their permanent home and they needed some sort of defense mechanism to shield them from the pain of evacuation.
Yet, in August 1983 (more than a year after the evacuation) when the researchers checked back with the evacuees, they found that while arguments over division of property continued to surface, on the whole most of the former inhabitants had succeeded in rehabilitating their lives. The exception were those evacuees who continued in agriculture; they felt exhausted, both emotionally and financially, from the effort to reestablish their lost farmsteads.